I was very glad to see that Darwin's Dinner made it into design. I entered my code from Humble Bundle into my Steam Client and it was accepted, but the game never showed up on any of my lists. Any idea what might have happened or how I find the game? I'm very curious to see what you have done with this very cool idea!

]]>17304Sun, 07 May 2017 06:11:13 +0000Days 7 and 8https://forums.doublefine.com/topic/17256-days-7-and-8/
Somehow ended up busy and didn't get around to doing an update yesterday. Tons of stuff is going in fast. Over the last two days it suddenly feels like we have a game.

I spent yesterday working on combat. Last night I did my first rough tuning pass on all of the combat related parameters in the game. Today we reworked player movement while attacking creatures to have a little bit of lock on. We also added a second species of creature which adds more variety to the combat. The actual world is getting built out with awesome art. And today we were figuring out how to distribute the creature populations across the island. Some screens have been hooked up: title, pause, death, win.

Death Screen (versions from yesterday and today)

Some Gameplay (seems to be playing at 2x speed, guess I need to figure out how to make gifs correctly)

]]>17256Sat, 22 Apr 2017 03:07:42 +0000Day 6https://forums.doublefine.com/topic/17242-day-6/
Quick update for Day 6. My focus today was on looking at the combat and figuring out how I'm going to tune it along with tuning the trait ranges for the creatures. We had two exciting things in the world of audio - We recorded the ship computer VO and got our first sketch of the music. We also (in the last few minutes) got the first test of our trait graph.

Here's our main character with some materials

Trait graph - you'll see this between hunting cycles to visualize the average creature traits each cycle

]]>17242Thu, 20 Apr 2017 04:27:33 +0000Day 5https://forums.doublefine.com/topic/17234-day-5/
Today marks the halfway point of Amnesia Fortnight. We had a review meeting this afternoon to look at the current state of the project and figure out what the major remaining work is. Spoilers: it's a lot of work. But here are some fun pictures of things that have happened in the last 24 hours.

Here's what happened when we swapped to a base creature model without any attached features

Here are the fancy new features in our simulation tool level showing detailed info on their traits

Here's what happen when you scale down a base creature body, but leave the attachments big (totally adorable!)

Here are some concepts of possible attachments for showing off different stages of creature traits

And finally, a screenshot showing the current state of the game. This is just a small test area, we haven't populated a full world yet. New art for plants, rocks, ship, ground, creatures, player character. Ground is going to have a more alien color to it eventually.

]]>17229Tue, 18 Apr 2017 17:17:56 +0000Translating Evolution to a Game Systemhttps://forums.doublefine.com/topic/17222-translating-evolution-to-a-game-system/
I've been thinking about this game for a while. It seems to me that there is a fundamental problem with translating evolution to games. In the real world, evolution creates new things. You start with a single cell (or something even simpler), and you eventually arrive at fishes and ants and elephants and humans. Games can't do that; you'll always be limited by the parameters the game designers envisioned.

In the pitch, Devin mentioned that they were aiming for two species, and three traits. I think that approach - having a fixed set of species - might not be the best way of approaching the game, given that you'll already end up with a very limited system, compared to real evolution. Instead, a different approach could be to do something that's closer to real evolution. Don't have species (in the real world, "species" don't exist; they're a human concept that attempts to describe how nature works, but fails when you start looking a bit more closely). Instead, during mating, compare the genetic difference (i.e. the difference in traits) between individual animals, and then allow them to mate if they're not too different.

That way, you'll get "automatic" speciation without implementing the concept of species explicitly!

If you hunt for slow creatures in one place, and for fast creatures in a different place, you'll eventually create two different, incompatible species. This also allows for weird concepts like ring species (neighbouring individuals can mate with each other, but individuals further away can't mate anymore).

This would require increasing the number of traits to include purely cosmetic traits like eye color, and maybe even introducing some entirely hidden traits that aren't visible to the player, and don't have a direct gameplay impact, but do impact speciation. After all, that's how the real world works, too.

Since some of these traits wouldn't have any direct gameplay impact, and since this approach would remove the concept of "species" as something that's implemented explicitly in the game, it might not be harder to implement than the concept shown during the pitch, but might lead to a more interesting, deeper game that emulates real evolution a bit more closely.

]]>17222Mon, 17 Apr 2017 10:31:11 +0000Day 2 Updatehttps://forums.doublefine.com/topic/17199-day-2-update/
I wanted to drop in and provide an update of development so far. It's been a fun and busy two days. Here is some of what we've been up to.

Story / Setting
The most dramatic update (based on the reactions of coworkers on other teams) is the work we've done developing story for the game. We've gone in a sci-fi direction. We start with the main character crash landed on an alien planet. This fiction works nicely for a few reasons. It removes some constraints on the types of creatures we can make since they're aliens. We're also using a periodic radiation storm in place of the literal winter I described in my initial pitch. You shelter in your crashed ship for the duration of the storm. But the radiation causes the creatures of the planet to mutate and evolve faster than normal.

Design
We've been having lots of design meetings. We've been thinking about what traits and behaviors creatures might have and what our player mechanics will be. Current version of player mechanics includes a sprint, pickup/throw (projectile attack), a sucking/harvest tool built into your suit that is used to capture creatures, and a teleport to get back to your ship quickly.

Gameplay Tech
We've divided gameplay tech development into two efforts:
1) Player hunting and creature behavior
2) Genetic simulation
Both efforts are moving forward nicely. We have a character running around in a world and we're adding in some hunting mechanics. We have some basic creature behaviors for fleeing and approaching the player. We don't have real art in the game yet, just the placeholder mannequin from unreal. The genetic simulation is going to allow us to test out reproduction scenarios independent of the survival gameplay. The hope is that this allows us to iterate faster when tuning the simulation.

Art
We've been exploring how to construct the creatures, getting some terrain materials into the project, and starting to build some creature and environment models. We've also been iterating on a bunch of cool concept art. I'll post a couple concepts in a reply to this thread.

Darwin's Dinner is a survival game where your actions shape the evolution of the creatures you eat. Explore the island to hunt a variety of species. There is genetic variation among the individuals of each species. After each foraging cycle, time advances to the next year and the remaining animals reproduce. The genes of those you ate will not be passed along to the new generation. Eat all of the slow bunnies this year? You may starve next year when the bunny population is quick to catch. Try to maintain the existing balance or reshape the species as you see fit. With careful food selection over the generations you can drastically change a species. Can you evolve a chicken into a ferocious dinosaur? Each playthrough is a chance to explore the possibilities as you find new ways to survive.